Rand Paul: Charlatan, Fool or Paranoiac?

 

 The Paranoid Strain in American Politics

A star is born in the Grand Obstructionist Party!  This seems the obvious conclusion based upon the response to Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, who conducted an old style filibuster by speaking for twelve hours on the Senate floor last week during the confirmation hearings for John O. Brennan, the President’s choice to head the powerful Central Intelligence agency.

The verbose Senator was roundly applauded by a mixed bag of paranoids and ideologues across party lines, as he railed on ad nauseum about the dangers of drone warfare, boldly demanding that the President assure us that no non-combatant American citizen who is sitting and quietly having his coffee will be suddenly attacked by drones on US soil.

It is a fear that struck me as having about the same probability of occurring as an invasion by men from mars. Yet given the wackadoodle nature of politics in the Republican Party these days, plus the widespread ignorance and gullibility of the American public when presented with conspiracy theories about the sinister intentions of their government, the most responsive government to public opinion in the world, many Americans are cheering Rand Paul for what they regard as the heroic stance of this lone Senator against the encroaching tyranny of government.

Even if the Kentucky Senator occasionally gets something right – like his opposition against escalating hostile actions against Iran – we must remember that a broken clock is right twice every day, but you wouldn’t  base important appointments on their ability to tell time.  And basing your views of how the world works on the blathering of Ron Paul, who reminds me of every pill freak I have ever know – don’t laugh cause this guy is a doctor and could well be self-medicating – is an exercise in folly.

Rand Paul’s views are often mercurial, ill-informed and reflect what the distinguished historian Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style” in American politics in his 1964 essay published in Harper’s Magazine.  Spurred by the reckless and dangerous rhetoric employed by Senator Barry Goldwater, a rightwing Republican from Arizona, in his bid for the US presidency, Professor Hofstadter offered the following observations.

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds.

It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.”

The fact that this description of American politics was written a half century ago, but could have been written about American politics today, supplies compelling evidence that this phenomena is a recurring theme in American political history.  Two contemporary examples will suffice: one on the right and one on the left.

The belief by an impassioned minority that the attack on the world trade towers and the Pentagon on 9/11 were carried out by the Bush Administration is a striking example of paranoia on the left.  And Rand Paul’s filibuster demanding that the president assure the nation that he would not use drones against non-combatant Americans on US soil is characteristic of the paranoia that fuels the Tea Party movement on the Republican right.  Although there are some who support this concern from both extremes of the political continuum – which is the case with Code Pink’s support of Paul’s filibuster – the Kentucky Senator is a right-wing Libertarian.

While some see Paul as checking the power of the President by demanding accountability, I think he was grandstanding for the press in an attempt to raise his national profile.  Already he is murmuring about a run for the presidency in 2016, but playing upon the paranoia of fringe elements on the right and left of the American political spectrum does not strike me as a winning formula.

The ideological range of those who have rushed to support Paul’s filibuster is intriguing; it reveals a Sympatico between elements of the right and left that share a paranoia about governmental power, exposing fissures in the ranks of the Democrats and Republicans.  On foreign policy matters Republican opinion ranges from neo-con hawks that are ever ready to intervene anywhere in the world with military might in order to enforce American foreign policy goals, such as Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, to Libertarian isolationists like Rand Paul.

The Democrats tend to be less interventionist than the Republicans, but they can be persuaded to deploy military forces on foreign soil if they are convinced that “freedom” is being trampled underfoot by bloodthirsty tyrants, and innocent lives are at stake.  It is an expression of what Henry Kissinger calls “the evangelical” character of American foreign policy. While earnestly seeking a peaceful world, President Obama has nevertheless been drawn into the conflict in Libya, and may yet be lured into the Syrian imbroglio – a move that will inspire some resistance among Democrats and Republicans alike.

The question at issue in Senator Paul’s filibuster however is the Presidents employment of drone warfare, and if is constitutional.  On this question party lines have become blurred. While anti-war Democrats concerned with guarding the civil liberties of Americans applaud Senator Paul, right wing Republican militarists such as Graham and McCain supports the President’s use of drones, ridicules their Republican colleague’s concerns and dismiss them as the foolishness that they are.

Taking the floor in an uncharacteristic defense of the President Senator McCain – who normally acts like he is still carrying a grudge because he lost his presidential bid against Obama – intoned “We’ve done, I think, to a lot of Americans by making them think that somehow they’re in danger form their government.  They’re not. But we are in danger from a dedicated longstanding, easily replaceable leadership enemy that is hell bent on our destruction.” 

Senator Lindsay Graham Joined the defense by pointing out that there was a drone program under George Bush, and there was none of the fears and anxieties being whipped up by Rand Paul and his supporters.  However Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont – Chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee – voted against the President’s nominee, incensed by the refusal of the President to provide memos detailing their legal arguments in defense of using drones against American citizens anywhere.  Thus far the Obama administration has only been willing to provide such memos to the Intelligence Committee.

It seems that Attorney General Eric Holder’s terse letter to Senator Paul, in which he answered the Senator’s questions about whether the President thought he has the right to fire a drone to kill a non-combatant American on American soil with a simple “No,” was enough to assuage the Libertarian Republican’s fears.  But the fact that liberal Democratic Senators Lehey of Vermont and Jeff Merkley of Oregon joined far right Republican reactionaries like Tim Cruz of Texas in rejecting the President’s choice to lead the CIA, dramatically illustrates the extent to which the Paranoid strain in American politics infects members of both parties.

A Blathering Clown!

 This Doctor’s  Prescription Spells Disaster!

That’s how they all ended up supporting the interminable blathering of a Senator who is either a charlatan or a paranoid fool…or a bit of all the above.  Alas the paranoid vision of the far right and the real left – the Marxist, not the miscast liberal Democrats – is such that you can barely tell them apart on some critical issues.  Their only distinction is that one is coming from the right and the other from the left, and as I have written elsewhere: It is a distinction without a difference!

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Playthell G. Benjamin

Harlem, New York

March 10, 2016

 

Tavis and West Expose True Motives

                    Heckle and Jeckle: Two Trickster Crows

 Truth Crushed to Earth….Will Rise Again!

When I was a boy in Florida the old folks would say “Truth cometh in the morning.”  Well that was never truer than on this Saturday morning, as I awoke to the snarky voices of Tavis Smilie and Dr. Cornell West chattering away on my radio.  I had fallen asleep listening to the soulful blues infested voice of the late great Dinah Washington singing the Duke Ellington/ Juan Tizol tune “Caravan,” and awoke to a hear the dissonant sound of a sarcastic soliloquy fashioned in the fevered brain of Dr. Longhair, and pouring from his pie hole in a lava like flow of putrid bile.  He was joyfully engaging in his favorite sport: Obama bashing.

First, the fuzzy headed professor contemptuously ridiculed the President’s negotiating skills, trashing him for not being able to get the “Public Option” passed instead of congratulating him on the massive overhaul of the medical delivery system that he did manage to finess through Congress with consummate political skill.  This achievement is a major reason why a panel of presidential historians has already selected him as one of the top ten American Presidents.

Yet it was the Affordable Health Care Act – along with the president’s achievements in preventing the collapse of the world economy and ending the Depression at home; his diplomatic triumphs in signing a nuclear arms agreement with Russia that helped insure the survival of life on this planet in a very real way; plus ending two wars, etc – that prompted me to rate him even higher on the scale in the pantheon of American presidents. (See: The Real Barack Obama vs. The Reagan Myth” on this blog)

However what I personally find most galling about Cornel West’s criticism of President Obama is his smug assumption of moral and intellectual superiority.  Part of this of course can be attributed to the smug pretentions of academics that hold PhD’s from prestigious universities – a feeling that is enhanced if they hold professorships at such universities – but I remain at a lost to discover the source from whence the professor’s feeling of moral superiority over the President arises.

With the diligence of Diogenes in search of an honest man, I  perused the history of both men and found nothing in my interrogation of professor West’s record that would provide evidence to support his arrogant assumption of moral superiority over President Obama.  In Cornel West I see a talented intellectual who is well educated in his fields of religion and philosophy, and a gifted orator whose notoriety as a public intellectual is do more to his silver tongue and public relations skills that his intellectual gravitas.   He is a highbrow rapper who, like Little Wayne, has made a fortune playing to the cheap seats.

Conversely, Barack Obama is one of those rare special altruistic personalities who decide to spend their life in public service early on; addressing problems that will enhance the quality of life for their fellow citizens, and they purposely make choices about the type of education they will pursue guided by what they think they will need to become change agents through participation in the political process.

That’s why Barack chose the law, Constitutional law, because he thought it would best equip him to become an agent of change.  That’s also why his fellow Harvard man Dr. WEB DuBois chose the study of history, sociology and economics over a career as a philosopher, and was indifferent to the importuning of Harvard’s George Santayana, perhaps America’s most influential philosopher, to become his protégé – an opportunity West would have leaped at.

Dubois saw that those disciplines would better arm him in the fight to uplift his oppressed people.  And his educational choices led him to become one of the greatest Americans of the last century, and his ideas, scholarship and activism contributed mightily to the advancement of black people here and in Africa.  These are very special people; men like Barack and DuBois.  Indeed, Barack Obama has shown a consistent commitment to changing the plight of the poor and powerless throughout his adult life.

First there was his decision to take a job as a community organizer in the dangerous poverty pockets of Chicago – the people Harvard sociologist William J. Wilson calls “The Truly Disadvantaged” in his revelatory text by the same name.  Then we have Barack Obama’s legislative record in the Illinois State Assembly, and his record in the US Senate.  All of these records unambiguously demonstrate a consistent record concern for the least among us – the poor and the powerless. If you would like to examine President Obama’s legislative record in historical context, see the list at the end of my essay “Civilization or Savagery” on this blog.

Alas, Professor West and his doppelganger Tavis Silly inflicted a conversation on the audience about the looming budget sequester that was so lightweight it would be an act of generosity to call it simple-minded prattle.  Maybe it’s because these guys are in such demand they don’t have time to thoughtfully reflect on these complex issues…or maybe they are shameless charlatans and vulgar careerist who have entered into a Faustian bargain with Mammon and they will say or do anything that will help them achieve their true goal: making money.   I tend toward the former assumption; although it is clear that these guys are scrupulous about getting paid…and as much as possible. After all Cornel gets $30, 000 for a speech.

I see no record of self-less service and sacrifice on the part of West.  From all appearances he is doing just fine on Cloud Nine, spouting dangerous sophistry masquerading as political wisdom, while abdicating his proper role as intellectual  point man in the fight against the Religious Right; whose theology fuels much of the ideology of the contemporary Republican Party.  Instead he attacks what he thinks are President Obama’s moral failings; he even called the President a “war criminal” the other day- while simultaneously calling racist reactionary rednecks like Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich his “Dear Brothers.”

Transparent opportunist that he is, when Dr. West and sidekick Tavis Silly invited Paul Wykoff, Vietnam war combat veteran and head of an organization of Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, on the show to discuss the plight of veterans, they quickly tried to enlist the old soldier and political progressive into their persistent attack on the President and turn the conversation into a referendum against his leadership and policies.

Paul Reickoff

 Spokesman for Iraq and Afghanictan Combat Veterans 

As West droned on in his annoying voice about the “Dronification of War,”using it to  continue his attack on President Obama, the conversation took an unfortunate for Dr. West and sidekick, exposing them for the lightweight blabbermouths that they are.     Rykoff first explained what it was like fighting on the front lines, since he is an ex-infantryman who saw combat.  He shocked them when he not only refused to denounce the use of drones – since he knows it will save American soldiers from risking life and limb to do the same job these robots do.

But the real kick in the head was when Wykoff said that President Obama was a very elightened leader on questions of war and peace.  He explained that the president had a sophisticated understanding of the technological options open to him as commander-In-Chief and were deploying them Solomonic wisdom .  He went on to say that more importantly President Obama has always pursued non-military options and prefers diplomacy to bombs because unlike many other people in Washington he understands that you cannot impose democracy in a country with bombs and bullets.

To hear Mr. Rykoff  tell it, President Obama is just about as enlightened and humane a leader as one could hope for in matters of war and peace.  Needless to say, I was on the edge of my seat with my ears cocked like a hound dog in anxious anticipation of the learned Dr. West’s response.  Would he acknowledge the possibility that he might have been wrong when he recently labeled the president a war criminal?   My wait proved to be in vain, as vain as Cornel West’s ego, for he  quickly changed the subject without comment.

West fared no better in trying to elicit Wykoff’s aid in painting an ominous portrait of the Africa Command’s mission on the African continent.   Wykoff saw nothing sinister in it, and only questioned whether we should be spending more money on developments at home.  After all, he was on the show to discuss the desperate plight of those who have bravely fought America’s foreign wars but are struggling at home.

I shall soon have more to say about what I think of drone warfare, and the Africa command.  But suffice it to say that in my view Dr. West’s position on drone warfare is neither intelligent nor morally superior to the Presidents; as he evidently thinks it is.  The more I hear from Cornel West the less convinced I am that he is a man of integrity, whose concern the poor and oppressed trumps his need for ego-gratification and the material rewards that accompany celebrity and intellectual notoriety in America.

Some of my colleagues have decided that he and Tavis are simply pimping off the misery of black people, the poor, the unemployed, and the economically distressed working and middle classes.  Since I once held Dr. West in high regard I don’t want to believe that he is that cold blooded.  I think Professor Bushy Bead is motivated by a combination of age old human failings of biblical proportions: Envy, Avarice, Ambition and revenge.  And these vices are fueled by combustible resentments of unrequited love.

If I had the ear of the President I would put a bug in his ear and hip him to how to handle this poot-butt professor; but since I don’t I’m forced to make a public plea: Please show this guy some love!  I would also tell him to consider President Lyndon Johnson’s strategy for handling that dangerous demagogue J. Edgar Hoover, who as head of the FBI, and thus had the capacity to create all kinds of problems for the President during a critical period of American history, when he was trying to do great things.

When Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked Johnson in exasperation, “Why don’t you just fire Hoover?”  To wit that wily old political player Lyndon Johnson responded: “Cause I’d rather have hoover inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in!”

Unrequited love is a Dangerous Thing

 

It leads to irrational destructive actions

 

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Playthell George Benjamin

Harlem New York

March 5, 2013 

The Struggle To Vote Continues!

On The Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights

 Afro-Americans, Racial Equality and Supreme Court

Watching Congressman John Lewis addressing the rally on voting rights in front of the US Supreme Court yesterday I got a feeling of de ja vu.  It was like America had turned back the clock to 1965, when John Lewis, then a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, made a similar speech on the great March from Selma to Montgomery to gain the right to vote for black southerners.  The vicious attack on lawfully assembled marchers, who were mostly Afro-Americans, as the attempted to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge leading to the former capital of the old Confederacy, shocked the world as it was broadcast around the globe on television.

It proved to be a sucker play on the part of the dumb desperate rednecks trying to preserve their “southern way of life,” the foundation of which was the severe oppression of black folks.  Instead they drove a stake through their own heart. The dim witted white officials who ordered the state police to arrest the advance of the demonstrators in a bloody melee of wanton police violence that was witnessed around the world didn’t understand that the world was changing, and what this implied for their racist apartheid system based on a Nazi like ideology of white supremacy.

The system of white world domination was rapidly crumbling due to the devastation Europeans wreaked on each other in the Second World War, and the rise of militant nationalism in Africa and Asia; the US was in a global struggle with the communist Soviet Bloc for the hearts and minds of the peoples in the newly independent nations.  However we now know, by virtue of studies on American diplomacy during this period such as Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, by Mary L, Dudziak, that those tasked with conducting American foreign policy considered the racist policies of the southern states a major stumbling block in their efforts to sell the American way of life to the leaders of emergent Third world nations.

For instance seven years before the passage of the historic 1964 Omnibus Civil Rights Bill, an Alabama court sentenced a 28 year old man black man named Jimmy Wilson to death for stealing two dollars.   This verdict sparked such intense outrage against the US around the world that Secretary of State John Foster Dullies got the federal government to intervene and stop the execution.  Everywhere he went Dullies was put on the defensive, when confronted with questions about white American barbarism in their treatment of Afro-Americans.

This was 1958, three years after the Bandung Conference, held in Bandung Indonesia, where the emergent non-white nations of Africa and Asia gathered to discuss their future in a new world order.  The question that preoccupied the American government was which side would they choose to align with: The capitalist or communist bloc?  It was a concern that would intensify as the Civil Rights movement against the legal caste system, which was the foundation of racial apartheid and white supremacy in the US, grew more vocal.

Indeed, Dean Rusk, President Kennedy’s Secretary of State, would write memos to Attorney Robert Kennedy complaining about how the racist outrages in the US, which the Russians made sure were widely publicized, was complicating his attempts to counter-Russian overtures to leaders of the new nations and their millions of non-white citizens.  Hence, as Dr. Dudziak shows, addressing major Civil Rights issues like desegregation, became an imperative for victory in the Cold War and thus the political elite was willing address the problem with a new urgency.

The Bandung Conference

Africans and Asians Contemplate a New World

This was the political atmosphere in which John Lewis spoke at the 1965 rally in Montgomery in an attempt to persuade the Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act which President Lyndon Johnson would sign into law,  with one of the most eloquent and impassioned speeches in presidential history on the equality of Afro-Americans before the law.

Now, almost a half century later, as a US Congressman, John Lewis is arguing in front of the Supreme Court in an effort to persuade them not to declare section five, the most important part of the Voting Rights Act, unconstitutional.

Once again the fate of Afro-Americans rest on a decision of the US Supreme Court, continuing a long established pattern in American race relations.  In the Dread-Scott Decision of 1857, three years before the outbreak of Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in a decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney that “Black Men have no rights that a white man is bound to respect.”  This left Afro-Americans in legal limbo, at the mercy of their racist white countrymen.  Among other things it meant that free blacks could not claim American citizenship and often had to travel abroad without benefit of a passport.

During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the Dread-Scott decision was reversed with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment on July 28, 1868.  This amendment conferred citizenship on Afro-Americans and mandated equal protection under the law.  In order to insure its ratification Congress made ratification a condition for the former confederate states to reenter the union. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870,  gave Afro-Americans the right to vote in quite explicit language: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’

The Radical Republicans, led by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner, was determined that the northern defeat of the southern Confederacy would not be a pyrrhic victory.  So they passed a series of Civil Rights bills to buttress the new constitutional Amendments beginning in 1866, and culminating with the sweeping Civil Rights act of 1875.

This Act outlawed racial discrimination in all public accommodations: hotels, public conveyances and places of amusement open to the general public.  The original draft of the Act by Senator Sumner included a provision outlawing segregation in public schools, but was struck from the bill because the Republicans didn’t believe it could pass.

Thaddeus Stevens

Indefatigable Champion of Afro-American Freedom

Two years later the Compromise of 1877,  a backroom deal struck by the Democrats and Republicans to resolve the disputed presidential election between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, effectively ended congressional Reconstruction and removed the protection of federal Troops from the south, leaving the ex-slaves to the mercy of their former masters.  A reign of terror was unleashed on Afro-Americans by armed white terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan all across the South.  One of its main objectives was to drive Afro-Americans away from the polls. This great terror continued into the twentieth century.

Despite  growing racist violence  aimed at  nullifying Afro-American gains during the period of Radical Reconstruction, four years later, in 1881, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 unconstitutional.  This was followed 15 years later by the Plessey vs. Ferguson Decision, popularly known as the “Separate but Equal Decision,” which made racial segregation legal.

Taking it to the Streets

The Klan struts its stuff in the Nation’s Capital

Doing their devlish work in the South

American Exceptionalism!

Hence by the turn of the 20^th century Afro-Americans had been stripped of virtually all the rights they had gained during the Reconstruction.  The South accomplished its goal of removing black citizens from the voter’s roles through a combination of extra-legal white terror and enacting all sorts of bizarre restrictions on the right to vote, while the Congress and Supreme Court turned a blind eye.

Afro-Americans were fixed in a racial caste system segregated from their white fellow citizens in virtually all spheres of personal and civil life, interacting only as employer and employee, or domestic servants in white households.  Separate but Equal remained the law of the land until the Court ruled in the Brown v. The Board of Education case of 1954, and passage of the Omnibus Civil Rights Act  of 1964; which outlawed segregation in the public schools and public accommodations.  In 1965 Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Together this legislation dismantled legal segregation and transformed southern politics.  The heart and soul of the Voting Rights Act  is Section Five, which requires states with a history of racial exclusion to submit any proposed changes in voting laws to the Justice Department for approval.  We can see from all of the Republican chicanery in the last election – where there were numerous attempts to suppress the black and Hispanic vote – that we desperately need the powers of Section Five to be expanded and vigorously enforced.  Not remanded as the state of Alabama, one of the worse historical offenders, is presently asking the Supreme Court to do.

In view of this reality the recent comments on voting rights by Justice Scalia, who is touted as a great legal mind, are the blathering of a charlatan or a fool.  This pie faced, pumpkin headed, black robed, pootbutt burlesque on a great legal theorist, had the unmitigated gall to call the Voting Rights Act “a racial entitlement.”   There is no shame in Scalia’s racist game!

Antonin Scalia

A Racist Buffoon!

Earlier tonight Rev. Al Sharpton played a series of comments by leading right-wing radio bloviators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, then juxtaposed them with Scalia mouthing the same putrid rhetoric…word for word.  The presence of foul hearted blaggards like Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court is a result of appointments by Republican President’s….so much for the Morons who say it doesn’t matter whether there is a Democrat or Republican in the White House.  Alas, they must share the responsibility for our present crisis.

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Playthell G. Benjamin

Harlem, New York

March 1, 2013

On Dov Hikind, Black Face and Jews

Assemblyman Hikind and Family

Is this Guy Really that Stupid?

I bet Dov Hikind is pissed with his son for putting this picture on the internet so the whole world can see it; otherwise it would have remained and inside joke between Hikind – a Brooklyn  Democrat who is New York State Assemblyman – and his constituents.  Did he learn nothing about the perils of the web from the fall of Congressman Andy Weiner, a brilliant politician who was forced to resign his office when he got busted flashing his weenie in cyberspace.  Did he not warn his son about the consequences of putting the wrong stuff out there?  Evidently he did not.

But to dress up in black face, put on a basketball jersey and say that he was just choosing a costume to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim, is dumber .  And Hikind’s response to complaints that his actions are offensive is dumber still.  For a smart Jew this guy does some really dumb things. Consider his initial reaction.

““I was just, I think, I was trying to emulate, you know, maybe some of these basketball players. Someone gave me a uniform, someone gave me the hair of the actual, you know, sort of a black basketball player…I can’t imagine anyone getting offended. You know, anyone who knows anything about Purim knows that if you walk throughout the community, whether it’s Williamsburg, Boro Park, Flatbush, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens Hills, people get dressed up in, you name it, you know, in every kind of dress-up imaginable. Purim, you know, everything goes and it’s all done with respect. No one is laughing, no one is mocking. It’s all just in good fun with respect always, whatever anyone does it’s done with tremendous amounts of respect and with dignity, of course.”

Really Dovie?  Are you really that clueless?  For a guy who is a super Jewish Nationalist who was once a follower of the rabid racist Rabbi Mier Khane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, a militant Zionist organization here in the US, then immigrated to Israel.  After settling in Israel Kahane advocated openly racist policies.  The late great Jewish investigative reporter with the Village Voice, Robert I. Freedman, pulled the covers off the Hikind-Kahane relationship in penetrating articles a couple of decades ago.  But Hikind’s tawdry past has now been forgotten in a country with a short memory that disdains the study of history.

For a Jewish Nationalist of Hikind’s vintage to claim that he does not understand why black people are offended by his black face get up exposes him as a duplicitous fraud.  And he has been called to task on this by thoughtful honest Jewish critics – he even offended the Anti-Defamation League, who rarely criticizes Jews about anything.  But given the experience of the Jews and their tradition of criticism and debate, as well as their long tradition of speaking out for social justice, it is not surprising.  One of the most penetrating critiques comes from Ehav Ever, an Israeli who lives in Jerusalem.  Writing on the comment thread of the Politicker, Ehav observes:

 

“There are a lot of Jews who are offended by non-Jews doing things, as a joke against Jews. Especially, when said joke has a long history of use by Anti-Semites. There are Jews who get offended by xian missionaries who started pretending to be Jewish in order to get Jews to convert.
Blackface jokes have a long and racist history behind them and for a Jew to claim to be connected to Torah and first take part in a tradition derived from Avodah Zara and then to take on a custom, blackface, started by those who used it as a part of systematic social degradation is anti-Torah to begin with. It is what the Torah warned against about taking on the practices of the nations.   The choice is simple a Jew can either cast his/her lot with the Ovdei Avodah Zara who created the blackface fad or a Jew can cast her/her lot with Hashem, Torah, and Halakha.”

Isn’t it incredible that a Jew living in faraway Israel can see the issue so clearly, who is aware of the pernicious racist history of whites “blacking up,” as it was called during the era in American history when black faced minstrel shows parodying black American life and culture was the most popular form of mass entertainment in the nation, but a politician representing a borough with hundreds of thousands of black people does not?  What does it say about the educational system in this country?

It tells us that the system has failed in teaching Americans their true history. This of course comes as no revelation to those of us who have been fighting for decades to get the complete story of American race relations properly taught in our public schools.  The problem lies in the fact that the history of Afro-Americans and Native Americans contradict the great American myth of “the home of the brave and land of the free,” which is the central theme in the master narrative of American civilization upon which the American Exceptionalists based their claims that Americans are morally superior to all the other nations.

Hence this is a willful ignorance designed to avoid unpleasant truths; psychologists call it “living in denial.”  This is the most generous explanation for Assemblyman Hikind’s behavior.  But given his history one cannot truly know what motivates him, so I won’t venture further into an attempt at psychoanalysis, a task for which I am unqualified.  Rather I shall remind Mr. Hikind that there is a long history of his racist role playing by whites in black face who defamed Black Americans for the entertainment of fellow whites.  And although this tradition was started by white Christians Jews, would play a major role in projecting it around the world.

In 1991 I was invited to present a lecture at Harvard on the relationship between blacks and Jews.  The lecture was sponsored by the WEB DuBois Institute, which was headed by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., who extended the invitation.  At the time there is a big uproar over a skit held at the exclusive Friar’s Club in which a Roast was held for the black comedienne who goes by the stage name Whoopi Goldberg.  It is customary for the honoree to become the object of derisive but good natured jokes told by friends and colleagues.  It’s a showbiz thing.

However there is an understanding that the jokes told are designed for the audience to laugh with the object of the roast not at them, which is the difference between good humor and ridicule.  It is a thin line that all comedians who use personal insult as a subject of jokes must be aware of; crossing it can result in real offense.  This is what happened when Whoopi’s Jewish boyfriend Ted Danson appeared in black face and Afro-wig then proceeded to call her a bunch of “niggers.”  The black people in the room were shocked and outraged; television host and former Naval Intelligence Officer Montel Williams said he felt like he was at a Ku Klux Klan meeting and New York Mayor David Dinkins said it was way over the top.

I wrote a column about it in the Daily News and I began my Harvard speech, “Strange Bedfellows: On blacks and Jews in America,” by reading it.  The point was to show how Jews, enjoying the racial privilege bequeathed by white skin in America, were given license  to exploit the Afro-American image in public venues that Afro-Americans were not allowed to do with the Jewish image without being labeled “anti-Semitic” and paying a big price.  Yet the Sambo image represented by burnt cork faces and Afro-wigs is an offensive a symbol to Afro-Americans as the Swastika is to Jews.

Titled “Dear Whoppi & Ted: Sambo is Still Not Funny,” I offered the following observations.   “Like Jim Crow Sambo has had a strange career.  He was last seen in black tux and tails, high hat, burnt cork face and grotesquely large lips professing his love for his Whoopi at the Friars Club.  Not everyone at the party was amused….This incident raises serious issues and poses fundamental questions about how the Afro-American image is exploited in the public arena.”

Danson had offered an apology, just as Dov Hikind has now done, only much faster.  “Words by themselves are not racist; racism is a matter of intent” he said.  My response was “No matter how well intended, Danson’s apologia is sophistry.  Negative images of African Americans are deeply embedded in the national culture, collective memory and imagination of Euro-Americans.”

I went on to review the history of the Sambo figure, quoting Professor Joseph Botkin’s authoritative study, Sambo: the Rise and Demise of an American Jester.  ‘The life of Sambo began with the early colonization efforts of the 17^th century…Sambo’s existence gradually evolved as western Europeans directed the energies of blacks on the Sugar plantations in the West Indies and the Tobacco fields of Virginia and Maryland.  Sambo was born during the infancy of the American Republic and over a period of time, Sambo became an integral part of the colonial family…Sambo was the first truly indigenous American humor character throughout the culture.”

By the middle of the 19^th century the Sambo figure reached the height of popularity in the Blackface Minstrle show, when it was first Anglo-Saxon performers like Thomas “Daddy Dan” Rice who “blacked up,” then the role was dominated by Irishman, and by the early twentieth century the major black face stars were the Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, both Jews.   And their acts were a big hit; Jolson was the biggest act of his time after he made the first “Talkie” movie with sound: “The Jazz Singer.”  It was a complete rip off of Afro-American culture that the world witnessed first as a parody of the real thing.

The movie was a big hit, grossing almost four million and almost two million in profits.  With the great success of Al Jolson the Jewish movie Moguls who built Hollywood made many movies with the Sambo figure, even when they began to employ real black  actors  – like Stepin  Fetchin, Willie Best, Mantan Moreland, Eddie Rochester Anderson, etc. – which froze the black actor in that role for decades.

Hence Jews in Blackface is no joke, it is a tawdry tale that cost the black community dearly.  When the sensational song/dance/comedy team Bert Williams and George Walker formed their act in San Francisco during 1893, there were so many white acts performing in blackface the billed themselves as “Two Real Coons.”  George Walker, a handsome dark skinned man who sometimes billed himself as “Mr. Chocolate Drop,” refused to black up, but Bert Williams was forced to paint his face with burnt cork in order to work in the Ziegfeld Follies – which was then the greatest show in the country…if not the world!

This is the painful history that Dov Hikind has conjured up.  And if he doesn’t know it, then he should study the history of this country more carefully instead of just the Jewish experience.  But I don’t think he really wanted to know.  If he did he need only reference the  big blow-up in this city after former Mayor “Crazy Eddie” Kotch performed a blackface routine with Afro-wig while he was serving as the Mayor.  And that’s unacceptable for an elected official in a city with a large Afro-American population.  And we won’t stand for it!

Like Crazy Eddie, “Dumb Dovie” is an ultra-nationalist Jew, and they guard the Jewish image very carefully; ever ready to do battle with anyone who insults the Jewish community.  Hence he should understand that Afro-Americans are as jealous of our image as American Jews are of theirs.  Furthermore this is the 21^st century, not the 19^th or 20^th, and we will not stand for racist insults by public officials.

That’s why Hikind ended up apologizing profusely after first doubling down. His “wrong and strong” routine sparked a fury from the Black community who were joined by anti-racist from all communities including the Jewish community, and he was roundly rebuked. A bit of free advice Dovie: You better Check yo self before yo wreck yoself!  ”

*********************

 Al Jolson

This Jew Became the Biggest Star in Show business Blacking Up

Eddie Cantor

A Major Jewish Star All Blacked Up

Bert Williams

 

Forced to Black Up to work in the Ziegfeld Follies

 

Stepin Fetchit and will Rogers 

 

Jewish Movie Moguls ferred the Sambo Image to real Black Actors!

*****************

(Double click to view)

Al Jolson In “The Jazz Singer”

http://youtu.be/PIaj7FNHnjQ

Eddie Cantor On Stage

http://youtu.be/AfaVanFZA_o

Playthell G. Benjamin

Harlem, New York

February 27, 2913

On Django UnChained

          

Jamie Fox, Leonardo Dicaprio and

A Wagnarian Saga about Slavery and a  Good Movie!

As is to be expected of a film that chooses a controversial subject – in this case the enslavement of Africans in America – Django Unchained has sparked an emotional debate. The loudest voices in the debate naturally belongs to intellectuals, who are most likely to dissect the film with weighty critiques.  Hence for one who is given to penning weighty polemics on important issues about politics and culture, it is with the greatest reluctance that I have decided not to jump body and soul into the critical debate and spar with my fellow polemicists.   However I cannot resist pointing out that much of the critical commentary is not about the movie at all.

For instance, after reading the critique by Ishmael Reed, a great novelist and brilliant essayist, it seemed to me that he decided to use the movie to not only whip Quentin Tarrantino for all the sins of the movie industry ad infinitum, but also to use the film as a weapon to bludgeon a wide range of adversaries with whom he has been waging interminable culture wars.  I mean what the fuck are doing talking about Dr. DuBois’ “Talented Tenth” in a review of a movie about a gun slinging ex-slave on a quest to free his enslaved wife?

It is bad enough that he does not understand the concept in historical context – in spite of my futile efforts to educate him, and I remain ever ready to debate the subject with him in writing – but to burden this movie with that antiquated debate is prime faice absurd!  While I find Ish’s cleaver floggings of intellectual adversaries in his innovative novels – “Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, “Reckless Eyeballing,” “Mumbo Jumbo” “Japanese By Spring,” etc. -   entertaining and has written as much – see my essays on Ishmael on this blog – his critique of this movie published in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, is a colossal bore and more than a bit silly.

In spite of myriad facts, Ishmael’s essay obscures far more than it enlightens.  For instance, at the beginning of the review he says he was turned off before he ever read the script or saw the movie because the studio that was producing it was evidence that it was being produced for a mainstream audience…say what?  This comment reflects a widespread misunderstanding of the movie business, and making movies is a business.

Movies are a commercial product and if they don’t make money the director won’t be making movies and the studio won’t be in business for long, because making money is an imperative for survival in the market place.  The Jewish movie moguls who created Hollywood understood this well, that’s why they were so successful.  One of the main reasons why black movie makers have not succeeded on that scale is because they are operating from a different premise.

The Jews were businessmen whose principle objective was to make money, so they produced movies for the mass i.e. “mainstream” market.  Since that market was white and Christian they made movies about white Christians.  They even created the blond sex goddesses such as May West, Gloria Swanson, Marylyn Monroe, et al.  They hardly ever made movies about Jews, and even required Jewish actors like Bennie Swartz to take Anglicized names like “Tony Curtis.”  And they were roundly criticized for it by Jewish organizations, as the astute Jewish film historian Neal Gabler has adroitly pointed out.

Jack Warner, head of the enormously successful Warner Brothers studio, once remarked that he was in the business of producing popular entertainment, and declared: “It I want to send a message I’ll call Western Union.”  On the other hand black film makers are expected to be messengers for black causes, or to make films for a black audience populated with black characters and concerns.  It is a formula that will generally insure that you don’t make much money.  And if the movie is also burdened with a weighty message at the expense of entertainment values, you will be lucky to break even!

In Django Quinten Tarrantino has found a formula that allowed him to make money and send a weighty message.  What is that message you ask?  Slavery was an evil, decadent, inhumane system of labor.  The slave holding class was not the noble cavalier Knights Margret Mitchell painted in her best-selling novel that became a blockbuster movie “Gone with the Wind” that won multiple Academy Awards.  Rather they were the “front porch Puritans and backyard lechers” who routinely raped black women, that that other southern woman writer Lillian Smith called them in her extraordinary text “Killers of the Dream.”

It also confirmed Dr. Franz Fanon’s thesis that it is therapeutic for the oppressed to kill their oppressors.  It is   a powerful counter-statement to the American Exceptionalists crowd who insist that America is so morally superior to the rest of the world that it justifies an evangelical foreign policy in which Americans can invade other countries in order to impose our values on them! In my view these multiple messages more than compensates for any shortcomings of the movie.

Hence impassioned denunciations of the movie written by black critics like Jessie Williams, a television actor, which was highly praised by Ryan Adams on Awards Chatter.com, strikes me as little more than persnickety nitpicking diatribes that produce more heat than light.  No movie can be all things to all people.  But I am especially annoyed by those white writers who are perturbed that black people like the movie.  It smacks of the worse kind of paternalism, and it reminds me of the old Ibo proverb: “Beware of the stranger who comes to the funeral and cries louder than the bereaved family.”

I have met very few black people who don’t like this movie.  More typical is the reaction of my highly educated 31 year old daughter Makeda and her boyfriend Odogu, a former boxer:  They loved it!  When I was dragging my feet about seeing it she continued to bug me.  She says that Django reminds her of me.  She told me about the scene in the movie where someone said they had never seen a black man on a horse and she thought: “I have seen my daddy riding horses with big hats on all my life…and she knows that I feel just like Django about racist crackers!  And then there is my friend Samaad, who paid to see the movie five times, or a female Filipino who loved seeing Django kill those crackers while rescuing his woman.

The point that intellectuals who hate the movie miss is that for most black Americans, who have always seen black slaves cowering in fear as they are humiliated and victimized by whites, this movie is a personal catharsis.  They are just ecstatic about witnessing a black man kill some whites on the big screen, and the more the merrier- Which. I confess, was also a great part of the movies appeal to me.  But beyond all that, it’s a damn good action/adventure movie, with sharply drawn characters played by actors of star quality, and the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice is as clear as day and night.  It has none of the tortured complexity and ambiguity that intellectuals glory in.

 A Stone Cold Killer on a Mission!

And black viewers loved ever drop of blood he spilled!

Ironically, Ishmael has a black avenging cowboy in his novel “Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, which I found fascinating but a friend of mine who is a novelist and professor of literature dismisses as “a parody of a parody that has nothing to do with the history of blacks in the old west.”  Hence much of art criticism, including the commentary on this film, is a matter of personal perspective and values – a question of personal taste.  And they are certainly entitled to their opinion.

However if this movie is evaluated from the perspective of historical accuracy and the art of making movies for a mass audience, which is how it ought to be evaluated, as commercial melodrama that reflects on a serious subject, it gets a passing grade from me. Critics of the movie have said that the story is not credible, that there is no historical evidence that suggests such a story could have happened.  I say they should hurry up and read Dr. Gerald Horne’s recent book “Negro Comrades of the Crown.”

Not only does he document the many Europeans who visited the US, observed the practice of slavery and responded with a passionate hatred for the slavers in scores of books, but the text is also rife with incidents of ex-slaves slaughtering whites, some rendered in gruesome detail.  He even has a story of an armed ex-slave on a mission to rescue his wife who was still enslaved!  So it is certainly a tale that could have been true.  And that is quite enough to justify the telling.  But lest we forget: This is a feature film, an act of the imagination that can claim artistic license, not a documentary to be viewed as a statement of historical fact.

However this rule can apply even when a feature film treats a specific historical event; as the heated debate around the Chilean film” No,” which depicts the 1988 plebiscite in that country that brought down the murderous military dictator Augusto Pinochet demonstrates.  Directed by Pablo Larrian, the film is based on a play “The Plebiscite,” by Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta, who also wrote the novel “II Postino,” which was made into an Oscar winning movie.

The film has been roundly criticized by some Chileans who participated in the struggle to defeat Pinochet, Jose Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean who witnessed it all and now serves as the director of Human Rights Watch Americas,  gave the New York Times 2/10/ 13  a different assessment.  He said the film was “a good effort to show a pretty accurate picture of Chile in the 80’s.”  He conceded that there were important events in that struggle that was “not a part of the film at all…but I went to see a movie not a PBS piece.”

This is exactly how Django should be viewed; it gives us a great felling for the cruel inhumanity of slavery and leaves no doubt that it was a crime against humanity.  And thus more than justifies the bloody carnage visited on white slavers by Django.  I do have some criticisms however.  For instance I would have chosen different music for many of the scenes.  In the opening scene I would have used the deeply moving and hauntingly beautiful Afro-American spiritual “Oh Freedom” and engaged the Fisk Jubilee singers to perform it.

And in the scene where the masked nightriders were chasing Django and his German partner, I would have used Wagner’s Ride of the Valkeries, which is great for an action scene featuring galloping horses, and the movie is working with the same German myths about Brunhilde and Siegfried that Richard Wagner built his “music/festival/drama” The Ring around.   Hence when the beautiful talented Kerry Washington says she saw the movie as a quest of a man to rescue his woman while slaying a few dragons in the process, she is right on the money.

Kerry Washington: The face that launched a bloodbath

She gave a moving performance

Indeed Django’s wife, played by Kerry Washington – who was easily the most beautiful woman at the Academy Awards ceremony – spoke German and was named “Broomhilde” – which some black commentators thought was ridiculous – duh?   It was supposed to be, since everything about slavery was ridiculous!  However when the German Doctor /Bounty Hunter explained the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde to Django he was also explaining the main plot of the movie.  It was a clever way of telling the story.

The proof is the reception it has recieved.  The way Austrian actor  Christophe Watz played the character with great wit and charm conjured up the Nazi officer he played in Tarrantino’s last blockbuster movie Inglorious Bastards, which I loved, and reminds us that in Django he created the same cathartic experience for Afro-Americans that he provided for Jews in Inglorious Bastards. And Christophe played the role so well he just won an Oscar for his performance!

The Charming but Deadly Doctor

Christophe Watz and Jamie Fox

However the main criticism I have of the movie is the portrayal of Sam Jackson’s character.  It is a stereotype that is based on a misunderstanding of history and the nature of “Uncle Tom.”  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character, introduced in the first bestselling American novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an accommodationist who loved his people but in his powerless state was force to play the role of obsequious slave while manipulating the all-powerful white folks.  This was a survival strategy that the great Afro-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar describes in his poem “While We Wear the Mask.”  It was represented in slave culture as “putting on ol massa,” which is to say play the white folks for fools.

This practice was expressed in a slave ditty that has been found all over the slave south :”Got one mind for white folks to see/got another mind I know was really me.  And they don’t know my mind” The character played by Samuel L. Jackson had a bit of this guile bh he more closely resembles Malcolm X’s “House Negro,” in his famous House Negro vs. Field Negro dichotomy.  The problem is that this is an ahistorical analysis because it was the “House Negros” who led the revolts.  That was true then and now.

I am continuously amused when I hear middle class black intellectuals repeat Malcolm’s ahistorical foolishness, because most of the sixties revolutionary leaders ended up as professors or some other middle class professions – and to the lumpen ghetto dwellers  gangsta rappers are the real rebels and they are the “house niggaz.”  It is an irony that somehow escapes them.   Django Unchained perpetuates the myth, because Sam Jackson’s house nigger really does love his master and believes that he is a God-like figure.  This interpretation flies in the face of the conventional wisdom…… but then it’s only a movie.   And when the gorgeous cinemetography is added to its other virtues its a damned good movie at that!

Sam Jackson as House Nigger

 Sam gave a great performance of a stereotyped character

 

******************

Playthell G. Benjamin

Harlem, New York

Fenruary 24th, 2013

I’M ROOTING FOR TOMMY L. JONES!

                      Tommie Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens

 Lincoln Resurrects “The Great Commoner”

I’m rooting for Tommy Lee Jones to win an Oscar for his riveting performance as Congressman Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln. Full disclosure: as an historian my hope is this might focus important attention on Stevens. This flamboyant Congressman (and his lashing tongue) had gained enormous name recognition in his time, but it was not the kind a mother wants for her famous son.

Until the modern civil rights movement those who wrote US history took a stick to Stevens.  He didn’t care. By the time he died in 1868 he had earned the appreciation of millions of slaves he helped free, and further admiration as “the father of the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments.” But until Tommy Lee Jones donned the man’s grim look, sharp wit, bulky swagger and advanced racial views, Stevens faced a thrashing in classrooms, textbooks and movies.

In 1915 Hollywood’s first blockbuster, Birth of A Nation, sought to humiliate Stevens — barely disguised as “Congressman Austin Stoneman.” Never has the media so venomously portrayed a US elected official. The film has Stevens ruining the South by elevating ignorant former slaves to high office.

A Poster Valorizing the Ku Klux Klan

 The Precursor to Nazi film “Triumph of the Will”

This in turn, the script continues, encourages African American officials [played by white actors in black face], to rape white women. In the final scenes the Ku Klux Klan rides in to save white womanhood and Christian civilization. Half a century after his death, this movie was still kicking the man for a good deal of its three hours and ten minutes. Its scenes also bury the fact that the south’s real rapists during and after slavery were planters who held whips and guns as well as public office.

To make its tale believable Birth of A Nation was given a documentary look, a stamp of historical truth and the endorsement of President Woodrow Wilson who called it “history written in lightening.” Wilson was quoted in the film prasing “a great Ku Klux Klan, a venerable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

For decades as the movie made a staggering $50,000,000, millions of men, women and children learned to hate Black people and cheer the KKK. Its debut in Atlanta Georgia jump-started the huge KKK of the 1920s which grew to 4,000,000 members. It took an NAACP national protest to remove a scene showing Klansmen castrating a Black man.

Stevens fared marginally better in Tennessee Johnson where the famous Lionel Barrymore portrayed a malicious politician plotting to destroy the South and white supremacy. Then a heroic President Andrew Johnson [Van Heflin] restores “home rule.” [Note: this was during the war against Nazi racism.]

As the 1915 silent epic and the 1942 feature film captivated audiences, our leading scholars road the same bandwagon. Echoing his profession’s view, Pulitzer Prize historian James Truslow Adams called Stevens “perhaps the most despicable, malevolent, and morally deformed character who has risen to high power in America.”

It is true that Thaddeus Stevens unleashed nasty, hateful invective on slaveholders, ridiculed incompetents, and relentlessly elbowed a cautious Lincoln toward emancipation. However, in 1861 the new President was not “The Great Emancipator.” His First Inaugural announced he would sign an Amendment [the original “13^th”] that would make slavery permanent.

In office he steadfastly refused to propose emancipation for his first 17 months. When he first announced his Proclamation, it was a statement he planned to issue a formal declaration on January 1, 1863, and only as a war measure. Given the President’s sorry record and fondness for compromise, Stevens, other abolitionists and people of color had every reason to worry there might be a slip from the cup to the lip.

Thaddeus Stevens: Radical Republican

The Great Commoner

 Stevens fast walked a different path: “There can be no fanatics in defense of genuine liberty.” He did not shrink from hazardous combat against the Fugitive Slave Law and defiantly turned his law office into an Underground Railroad station. When a band of armed slave runaways in nearby Christiana opened fire on a slaveholder posse led by a US Marshall, Pennsylvania’s most famous attorney volunteered for their defense and won acquittal for the arrested.

Even Stevens’s fiery attacks on slaveholders came with some risk. Twice on the House floor he had to fend off Bowie knife wielding southern colleagues. As abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner sat at his Senate desk South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks beat him senseless with his heavy cane. Sumner never completely recovered and slaveholders praised Brooks.

From his birth in 1792 in Vermont Thaddeus Stevens lived with adversity. His father Joshua was an alcoholic shoemaker unable to hold a job so the family struggled. Then when Joshua disappeared never to return his mother Sally had to pick up the pieces. Resourceful, energetic and determined to see her four boys educated, she paid family bills through long, grueling work as a maid and housekeeper.

Thaddeus also stepped into life with a clubfoot when society saw this as a Devil’s curse, a sign of mental depravity. From an early age he learned how to battle people who derided him, think for himself and stick to his guns. His own fight with irrational hate may have opened his heart to others society classified as lesser humans.

Stevens graduated with a law degree from Dartmouth College, and opened a law office in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His fortunes changed when he bought a Pennsylvania iron works and a Forge, and invested in farmland. He was elected to the state senate just as the legislature voted down an education bill because it raised taxes to aid poor families.

Stevens stormed into the fight with this argument: “the blessing of education shall be conferred on every son of Pennsylvania, shall be carried home to the poorest child of the poorest inhabitant of the meanest hut of your mountains, so that even he may be prepared to act well his part in this land of freedom, and lay on earth a broad and solid foundation for that enduring knowledge which goes on increasing through increasing eternity.”

His speech led to passage of the state’s education law and made him “the father of public education in Pennsylvania.”

In 1848 Thaddeus was elected to Congress raring to fight the “slaveocracy.” He was also drawn to issues of economic injustice. In 1852 he opposed employers who sought to “get cheap labor” by lowering American workers’ wages to European levels, and by using under paid women laborers. Such efforts, he insisted, keep “the laboring classes [with] scarcely enough to feed and clothe them . . . [and] nothing to bestow on the education of their children.”

In 1853 Stevens had to return to his law office in Lancaster to pay business debts of over a quarter million dollars. But in 1859 he returned as a Republican Congressman. When it was far from popular he denounced bigotry, spoke in defense of Native Americans, Jews, Mormons, Chinese, and women’s rights.  And he intensified his crusade against the slaveholder aristocracy.

Lydia Hamilton Smith

Thaddeus Steven’s Common Law Wife

Stevens had never married and since 1848 shared his large Lancaster home with Lydia Hamilton Smith, an African American, and her two sons from a previous marriage. While he and Mrs. Smith considered their relationship a common law marriage, his foes saw coarse degeneracy. He refused to publicly explain what he considered a private matter. His will left Mrs. Smith enough money to purchase the family home and live in comfort. Birth of A Nation has Mrs. Smith, played by a pudgy white actor who greets news of Lincoln’s assassination with a dance and shout: “You are now the most powerful in the United States.”

Despite his differences with the President, Stevens forged a respectful alliance with the politician he came to call “the purest man in America.” As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee his control of the war’s finances made him the most powerful member of the House. Lincoln held the power to make emancipation permanent.

The two needed each other. In the 2012 movie Lincoln Stevens is cast as the radical whom Lincoln must tame to insure passage of the 13^thAmendment. This is Hollywood drama. The ardent abolitionist was as shrewd a politician as Lincoln, and needed no persuasion to support his life’s goal.

Fawn Brodie, Stevens admiring biographer, calls him “the scourge of the South.” But Stevens’ harsh, lacerating tongue speared Congressional incompetents as well as pro-slavery southerners and northerners. He could reduce political foes to gibbering self-doubt.

During the pivotal Gettysburg campaign in 1863, a Confederate Army rode out to kill him. Confederate Major General Jubal Early detoured his Army of Northern Virginia from Gettysburg to Stevens’ iron works at today’s Caledonia State Park. Unable to find him, “hang him on the spot and divide his bones,” Early ordered his men to burn everything, and steal his horses, mules, grain and iron bars. Stevens had to borrow money to rebuild.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation brought the two men together. Stevens called it “a page in the history of the world whose brightness shall eclipse all the records of heroes and of sages.”Now “this Republic . . . [could] become immortal.” The two now marched down the same road, Stevens, as always, at a quicker pace.

As the war’s casualties passed half a million and its cost soared to four billion dollars, Stevens’ concern turned to those who bore the greatest burdens — “the poor widow, the suffering soldier, the wounded martyr to his country’s good.” He denounced the new draft law that allowed a rich man to hire a substitute for $300 – and which led to four days of rioting among the poor in New York City. As real wages fell and business profits rose, he denounced bankers [whom he never liked] and “war profiteers.”

Tommy Lee Jones Gave a Riveting Performance

Bravo!

In vain Stevens and his Committee tried to prevent northern manufacturers from selling the government useless rifles and damaged goods at inflated prices. He wished “no injury to any, but if any must lose, let it not be the soldier, the mechanic, the laborer and the farmer.”

Stevens explored new directions. He welcomed the liberation of Russia’s serfs as a step toward world freedom. He encouraged a women’s delegation to hasten their drive for the suffrage. When Napoleon III of France made Emperor Maximilian his puppet ruler of Mexico, Stevens urged Congress to aid and provide loans to Mexico’s Indian President Benito Juarez.

As he grew older friends called Stevens “The Great Commoner.” He asked to be remembered as one who tried “to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.” He said, “I have done what I deemed best for humanity. It is easy to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. But it is a great labor to protect the interests of the poor and downtrodden.” His enemies said he betrayed his country and his race, and often his class.

For Stevens and the United States everything changed when the assassination of President Lincoln brought Andrew Johnson to the White House. A poor white scornful of African Americans, he envied and worked to restore the power of the South’s planter class.  Stevens plan for “a radical reorganization in southern institutions, habits and manners” led to repeated clashes. Stevens also faced a Republican party increasingly dominated by northern business interests who valued trade relations with former slaveholders not the new Constitutional Amendments.

Stevens failed to bring justice, equality and a fair distribution of land and power to the South. But Stevens knew his and other abolitionist prodding led to Lincoln voicing his support for voting rights for Black soldiers and educated Black males.

Yes, Stevens can be faulted for his truculent manner, for believing he could defeat his foes’ economic and political influence, and for seriously underestimating racism’s grip nationwide. He fought to have the black and white poor own land, attend school, vote and enjoy equal rights. Though this proved to be an unfulfilled dream, he could not be faulted for his effort. It would require another century, other, younger dreamers both African American and white.

In death Stevens affirmed his goals. His coffin was carried to the Capitol by an honor guard of five African American and three white soldiers. He had asked to be buried in the one Lancaster cemetery open to all races. His grave stone bore his own epitaph: ”I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: equality of man before his Creator.”

Yes, Tommy Lee Jones deserves an Academy Award!

And Thaddeus Stevens deserves a full hearing!

******************

 

William Loren Katz

New York City

February 24, 2013

**William Loren Katz is the author of Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, and forty other books on African American history. His website is: www.williamlkatz.com

A Note to Republicans in Congress!

Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Rob Portman

Do your Damned Job!

Of all the criticisms leveled at President Obama the one that strikes me as the silliest and most unfair is the complaint that the reason Republicans refuse to work with him on critical legislation is because he doesn’t hang out with them and court them as if he were wooing a teenage girl.

We are expected to believe that on issues as important as the impending budget “Sequester,” a fiscal time bomb that was never supposed to go off and if it does will be a devastating blow to the US economy that could throw us back into depression, the Republicans in Congress are refusing to act because the president hasen’t been swilling “keggers” with them.  It is hard to imagine a more patently ridiculous argument!

Aside from the fact that the President faces myriad issues daily that only he can deal with, and this consumes the lion’s share of his day, he is also a husband and father of two teenage daughters.  One would think that this would be applauded by Republicans; since they never tire of preaching the virtues of family life. The people who are upset that he is not a schmoozer appear to overlook the fact that he has a right to a private life, and that this is important to his personal well-being and state of mind.

Hence one need not languish in deep contemplation on this issue because it is prima facie absurd. The Republican Congress is presumably composed of mature, thoughtful adults, people who were elected by their constituents to conduct the business of the nation by passing legislation designed to solve the problems that constantly arise in the life of a great nation. While the drafters of the Constitution intended for it to be difficult to pass laws that will affect the course of the nation and the well-being of the citizenry, they certainly didn’t intend to make it impossible to govern.

There is a school of thought that believes the three fold division of power – with the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government checking and balancing each other – is a good idea in theory but contains the seeds for disaster.  There was always the possibility that it could result in gridlock that makes it impossible to govern; yet the fact that 200 years later we have emerged as the most powerful nation in the world provides impressive evidence that it was a good idea.

For most of our history this system has served the American people well.  It has achieved its main objectives admirably: preventing the rise of a tyrant and offering an alternative to armed insurrections in order to transfer power. After all, these were men who witnessed the tyrannies of the Old World and wanted to create a system that would prevent the rise of tyranny in the nation they were forming.

There is grand irony in all of this, because one could argue that the Founders’ fear of tyranny was fueled by hypocrisy in that they were enslaving Africans and dispossessing indigenous Americans of their lands by force of arms: there were no greater tyrannies anywhere in the world. It was a glaring contradiction that most of the Founding fathers chose not to deal with when they were drafting the Constitution –which is why the word slavery is never mentioned in this exalted document – but the great abolitionist and moral clarion Frederick Douglass never tired of pointing out.

And recent historical scholarship such as Dr. Gerald Horne’s book “Negro Comrades of the Crown, and Slave Nation, by the law professors Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen, convincingly argue that preserving African slavery, not the freedom of white colonists, was the motive force that propelled the war for independence against England and was a powerful influence in shaping the US Constitution.

Hence one could argue that the Founders fear of tyranny was magnified by their practices toward black people.  After all, preaching one thing and practicing another is at best base hypocrisy and Schizophrenia at worse.  All of these fears and contradictions no doubt played a role in shaping the Founders views about checks and balances on government actors and the power they wield.

It also explains why the military was placed under a civilian Commander-In-Chief, and why they included an impeachment process for Presidents or Federal Judges with lifelong appointments. This is also the reason why power is diffused into state and municipal governments, and the resulting ambiguity around exactly who has jurisdiction over what is the reason why we are still arguing about these questions over two centuries later.

When all things are considered, the Founders believed that all parties would act in the best interests of the nation.  Never in their wildest imagination did they dream that contending political parties would elevate the interests of their party over the vital interests of the nation, and that compromise, which is built into system they created, would be viewed as betrayal!

Obviously when this happens the system breaks down and becomes dysfunctional.   In the worst case scenario the country degenerated into civil war…and today the triumph of ideology over pragmatism among Republicans has turned the Grand Old Party into the “Grand Obstructionist Party” and it has crippled our government’s ability to govern.  Hence there are critical issues that cannot be addressed; the result of which is a continuous series of self-induced crises

If anybody thinks that the hard left is innocent of these vices: think again.  The far left is as irrational as the far right when it comes to the imperative of comprise as a vital part of the America political process.  Leftist ideologues have called the President as many nasty names as the so-called Tea Party Patriots – Check out  the essays compiled under “My Struggles on the Left” on this blog – and would be every bit as dangerous if they wielded the political power exercised by the right.

The result is an increasingly dysfunctional government unable to address the pressing problems facing our country; it is a situation that portends disaster!  That’s why the President is taking his case to the electorate in a series of public speeches designed to educate them on what is at stake in the looming sequester.  As I write he is holding a press conference with First Responders, the people we all depend upon when disaster strikes – whether man made or from natural causes i.e. Katrina, Sandy or the 9/11 terrorist attack by Islamic Jihadists.

The picture the President is painting of the consequences if the sequester goes into effect are dire and frightening.  And he is skillfully posing this scenario as the result of a choice by Republicans to inflict pain on the American people, and shoot craps with the fate of the nation, just to save the filthy rich a few dollars in taxes.

This is an especially odious choice since the rich wouldn’t even miss the money, but the fate of many Americans will become imperiled.  And by flashing the numbers of Americans who will lose their homes, jobs and other vital assets, along with those who will lose vital government assets, his message takes on great power.

Taking it to the Streets

The President with First Responders

And the President is scaring the hell out of Republicans, who fear that they will be blamed should the disastrous sequester actually kick in.  You can hear it in the mealy mouthed whining of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; he who pledged to throttle the Obama Presidency through non-cooperation, making the failure of the Obama presidency not the welfare of the nation the Republican goal.  And it is echoed in the increasing panic of John Boehner, “The Weeper of the House.”

What we have here is a deep ideological divide, contending and irreconcilable views of the role of government. And although some of these Republicans know this is self-destructive folly, the far right racist constituency they must appeal to in order to avoid having to face an opponent who is further to the right in the next primary election, will brook no compromise with the Democrats…especially this president: a bumptious, uppity nigger who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else

This problem runs so deep it’s in the DNA of the contemporary GOP, and it cannot be solved by the President having a few beers and shootin the shit with these guys! Not when it’s a political liability to even be seen with the President – it cost Charlie Crist his Job as Governor of Florida!  That’s why all of them snubbed the President’s invitation to come up and view the bio pic of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest President of in their Party’s history, along with less dramatic snubs.

Hence it is nauseating to hear pompous sophists and intellectual poseurs like Joe Scarborough – a failed politician who now pretends to the role of political wise guy – and his chattering cronies, promoting the bogus argument that the reason the Republicans refuse to participate in responsibly conducting the nation’s business is because Barack doesn’t hob nob with them after hours.  I would like them a simple solution that appears to have evaded the talking heads: JUST DO YOUR DAMNED JOB!!!

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Playthell G. Benjamin

Harlem, New York

February 19, 2013